Chapter 90

Myrtle turned over again on her straw mattress. Sleep was not coming to her tonight. The stifling air of midsummer was compressing her little cellar room, a suffocating force from outside. She felt she was sleeping less lately than some of her friends who had husbands, and who wryly complained to her over laundry baskets of their nocturnal duties.

Something always had held her back from marriage; not any kind of disdain toward the life of a wife and mother per se, but more something as yet unrealised, palpable, that often bristled within her as she lay in her cot at night. A difference. An affinity with something she could not yet identify. Her suspicion as to what this was both terrified and exhilarated her. Certain others around her seemed to perceive this simmering force. Always women, always unspoken. The owner of the apothecary, Freida, always seemed to hold her gaze a little too firmly each time she went to pick up father's salve. Daisy, who brushed and mucked out the h